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31 May 2010

We had a fantastic week running and attending activities, but of course the highlight was the self proclaimed lunatic farmer himself Joel Salatin.Thanks so much to DMP and to The Lake House who brought Joel out from America. The Daylesford Organics team attended every seminar he gave, but the best part of all came last Friday when Joel came to our farm to walk around and talk to us.

Nine years ago when we started farming organically and were on the steepest learning curve imaginable, it was Joel's books that advised us on many of the particulars like movable chook houses and electric netting fencing and indeed gave us permission to believe we could do it.

When not many other farmer's wanted to share their knowledge with us, Joel's books did.

Nine years ago, many of Bren's sentences started with 'Joel says...' and this renegade farmer gave us permission to do things in an unconventional way and to make our farming dream a reality.

Nine years later on a wild and wet afternoon, Joel came to our farm and spent the best part of an hour walking around, looking at our systems and discussing our plans with us. Of course he recognised a lot of his own systems and ideas but he was also very complimentary and interested in our methods too.

It was one of those fantastic full circle life events. Here we were with the master showing him what we had learnt but also how we had developed our own farming systems.

We spent the last part of Joel's visit discussing future directions Daylesford Organics could take and let me tell you, watch this space because we are pretty excited to put some of his suggestions in place.

As Joel was leaving our farm Bren asked him to sign one of his books. The book is called You Can Farm and in it Joel wrote 'Oh yes you can - and yes you are.' How cool is that!

Saturday brought with it the publication of one of my photos in the A2 section of The Age newspaper. There was a 'top 5 farm gates' and they listed us as number one.

When I opened the newspaper up in the car park of the local service station I screamed. Loudly. I was thrilled they had made us number one and that my photo was enormous.

I guess we do owe an apology though to those who read the bit in the paper and then came to visit us yesterday only to find we were closed. Unfortunately, while we knew the piece in the paper was coming, we had no idea which date it would be published and it was bad timing that it coincided with an all day seminar by Joel. The seminar was called 'How to scale up without losing your soul' and was attended by our whole team leaving no one to man the stall.

We do feel terrible if you made the journey and we weren't here and hope that you found other ways to busy yourselves in the area.

25 May 2010

Do you want to know what's going on with the weather at Daylesford Organics at the moment?

If you click on weather at the top of this page, it will take you to a page full of information including the outside temperature, the amount of rain we've had (this will be updated soon), the bottom row (soil temp 1) is the temperature inside the cool room and you can even see the temperature inside our house.

You should definitely check the weather site before coming on the Walking the Talk tour this Saturday, so you know whether to wear your gumboots or your sunhat.

We had such a great time on the first tour last Saturday.

I just got this email from two of the girls who came along:

Dear Brendan and Kate,

Just wanted to say thanks for a wonderful tour on Saturday. So enjoyed seeing your beautiful farm and all that you have achieved there in 9 years - truly inspiring!!! Left feeling so grateful there are people like you, so passionate about what they do and willing to share it with others. My little one loved the chooks!!!! And eggs are delicious!!!

About Us

We are a Certified Organic mixed family farm in Daylesford Victoria. We focus on sustainability and biodiversity. We have orchards, market gardens and chickens. We work with the seasons and in any given year will produce up to 40 varieties of apples, hazelnuts, berries, free range eggs and up to 30 different vegetables often with several varieties of each. We specialise in growing heirloom varieties with lots of different flavours and colours. We sell our produce to local cafés and restaurants, at farmer's markets and at our recently opened farm gate stall. Visitors to the stall are able to experience first hand where and how their produce is grown, talk to the growers and buy the freshest, just out of the ground produce.